My final Max evolution has arrived! In this assignment, I have delved further into programming logic, computer vision, and video effects, as seen in my three studies respectively.

For assignment 4, I have spent a lot of time polishing my works, so that they have a very presentable and user-friendly feeling to them, meaning you don’t need to know anything about Max to use them.

I think the most challenging aspect of this assignment has been figuring out how to sustain interaction for the required amount of time. I think my most successful attempt at this was my Study 7 project, which was the webcam slider puzzle. This was a very difficult puzzle that looked very easy, which meant that people would put a lot of time into solving it thinking they were just around the corner from the solution (even though this often wasn’t the case). I have probably spent over an hour in different attempts to solve that puzzle, and I have only been able to do it once. However, there is a bit of a trick to it, which users might be able to figure out after putting a bit of time into it.

The other two studies I think can hold attention for the required 5-7 minutes as well, however, there is nothing about them which requires the user to put in a lot of time, they are generally just quite fun to play around with. The particle system has one or two settings which the user can try out that will create different results, but most of the enjoyment comes from trying to get the particles to make specific shapes. Ultimately the particle system isn’t where I’d like it to be, but technical and scope limitations would make it unreasonable to attempt to get it to an ideal state.

The other study, study 9, I think was a nice little sentimental work, recreating my first work as my final one. I thought it was kind of fun to experiment with video effects without really having a goal in this one. I was really happy with how the 3CCD / VHS effect came out (the one that creates the blue and red lines around things. Realistically, there are better and more accurate ways to do this effect, but I’m pretty happy with the stylistic elements of the one I have created.

I think one of the most valuable skills I learnt through this assignment was how to use the cv.jit libraries effectively. I ended up trying a lot of different objects from this package when working on my Study 8 project. The one I settled on was the cv.jit.track object, which uses the webcam’s optical flow to track a point in space along the webcam’s two-dimensional plane, this returns an xy co-ordinate based on the tracked pixel’s position. I found that cv.jit is a very powerful tool, however, it can often be a little hard to implement the outputted data into other systems the way that you would like.

I’m finally starting to get comfortable working in Max, the learning curve seems pretty steep, but I think I’m finally over the hardest part. I’m not having to spend as much time troubleshooting, whereas in previous studies I would spend hours troubleshooting and then realising something wasn’t triggering properly because of the right -> left reading system or something small and Max specific like that.

I’ve learnt a lot about using Max for creating interactive media projects this semester, having never used this software previously. I now feel comfortable prototyping ideas and then developing them into a finished project, including executable application files for use on computers without Max installed. I’ve very much enjoyed learning this completely new realm of skills, and I think my newfound knowledge of Max and interactive media will come into great use for future creative projects, especially the more ‘out there’ ones.